Episode 152: How to Have Hard Conversations

Sherry and Rob talk about the importance of having hard conversations and how to do it well. They break down the process and discuss how to prepare to have these conversations, things to be mindful of during these kinds of conversations, and how to end the conversations.

Episode Transcript

I just [inaudible 00:00:09] wouldn’t accept Rob tonight so I had to make something up.

Sherry Walling:

Wow, it’s going to be an interesting night. So, a night recording. We almost never night record.

Rob Walling:

It’s because they go off the rails, things go catastrophic. People unsubscribe and rage quit.

Sherry Walling:

People rage quit our podcast. Well, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this week and the kids were off school, so our normal Monday recording time didn’t really work. This is going to be a hoot because it’s late at night because we’re tired.

Rob Walling:

The kids are in bed but not asleep, and we’re just a little loopy. Not super loopy, but loopy enough that it’s going to be a good evening.

Sherry Walling:

Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling very experimental tonight.

Rob Walling:

Oh, yeah?

Sherry Walling:

Yeah. I mean, this is going to blow your mind. Are you ready?

Rob Walling:

Yes.

Sherry Walling:

I put chocolate soy milk in my mint tea.

Rob Walling:

Whoa!

Sherry Walling:

I know, right?

Rob Walling:

Mind blown.

Sherry Walling:

I was sort of hoping it would taste like-

Rob Walling:

Chocolate mint?

Sherry Walling:

Chocolate mint candies.

Rob Walling:

That was not what I thought you were going to say, but okay. That’s great.

Sherry Walling:

What were you hoping I would say?

Rob Walling:

Just that we were going to experiment with a new podcast format.

Sherry Walling:

Okay, let’s talk about podcasts.

Rob Walling:

It’s going to be good.

Sherry Walling:

Speaking of marital bliss, that was an awesome transition. We are putting together the framework for a course that will be about founder families, and how to be awesome at your business and how to stay connected to the people that you care about.

Rob Walling:

Right, and it’s not just a framework, it’s going to be an actual course to help people … is it loved ones or is it significant others?

Sherry Walling:

It’s significant others.

Rob Walling:

Yeah, so this one is not about kids, but if you have a boyfriend/girlfriend, a spouse, significant other, a partner of any kind it’s how to run your business and also stay connected with that person. It’s a framework blueprint. It’s a course to help you do that better.

Sherry Walling:

And my intention in mentioning it at this point is that we are still building the framework, we’re still building the blueprint of what will be included in the course. If you have questions, or things that you would love for us to talk about, or like your own stories of how your business life really had a negative impact perhaps on your relationship with your significant other, this is a great time to email us, or tweet at us. We would love to make a course that’s actually super helpful to you, so we’d love to know more about how we can make it helpful to you.

Rob Walling:

Good email address for that is sherry@zenfounder.com.

Sherry Walling:

And it’s Sherry like the wine, S-H-E-R-R-Y.

Rob Walling:

What are we talking about today?

Sherry Walling:

Today we’re going to talk about how to have hard conversations.

Rob Walling:

Ah, yes.

Sherry Walling:

Which seems like a really great thing to talk about when we’re both tired.

Rob Walling:

Yeah.

Sherry Walling:

Since one of the things that’s really important about having hard conversations is not to have them when you’re tired, but alas.

Stressed was one, and the other three were the same thing. You’re right.

Sherry Walling:

Hungry, in pain-

Rob Walling:

Sick-

Sherry Walling:

Thirsty, grumpy.

Rob Walling:

It’s a big deal because there are hard conversations with your significant other, hard conversations with your parents, your siblings, your family. There are hard conversations with co-founders and employees. It’s the gamut, right? It’s a 360 thing. You will never get away from this. Even if you are the founder of your own company you will have to have conversations that are hard for people around you.

Sherry Walling:

And I think it’s a great skill to be able to do that well. Again, in any domain of your life, when you are someone who is able to be authentic, and open, and clearheaded in the context of a topic that’s kind of emotionally loaded, either for you or for someone else, or for both of you, which is the hardest conversation, it’s a great skill to cultivate. I think many of us have a lot of dread about hard conversations whether those are conversations about money with your co-founder, or with your spouse, or a difficult situation with one of your children. It is imperative that you are thoughtful and as clear headed as you can be, and don’t go stomping into hard conversations with a lot of emotion and not a lot of reflection.

Rob Walling:

Yeah, it’s easy to do that and to kind of wing it, or kind of halfway prepare for it and think, “Well, I’m going to say this and that.” And you get in, the first sentence derails you, and then you’re going from like lizard brain. As soon as you revert to your instinct, I use lizard brain loosely, but it really is when you get scared and you fight or flight or whatever, that’s when things go sideways in a big way. You never want to get there, you want to have prepared for all the eventualities.

Sherry Walling:

So, we want to break down our conversation about hard conversations into three components. One is the preparing aspect of how to get yourself ready for hard conversations. The second section is some tips to be mindful of during the hard conversation, or how to engage the topic in a way that will optimize the likelihood of success. And then, how to end those kind of conversations well. I think when you are getting ready to have a tough conversation it is really essential to be really clear about what your desired outcome is. And that could fall under a variety of categories. So, you’re either trying to communicate information to clarify something, to teach someone on your team how to do something that maybe they have not done correctly before. Perhaps you’re trying to solve a problem. We have had a number of conversations with our kids about topics that they fight about really often, and it’s this recurring drama and so we want to solve that problem, or break that pattern and go about that in a different way.

Perhaps you’re wanting to communicate your feeling or your perspective. I mean, I think we have a lot of these conversations in the context of our intimate relationships, where something hurt you, or you’re bothered by something and you want to have a conversation where you can communicate that to your partner in a way that they understand, or a way that brings you to a new level of connection despite something making your relationship strained. Sometimes I think we have hard conversations because we want to understand someone else’s feelings, or their decisions. We don’t understand why they made the choice that they did, and we want to really go to them and try to figure out, so we can understand better their perspective and not be so angry, or so hurt about what we perceive as the driving motivations for their actions. Whatever desire you have in going into the conversation, I think it’s helpful to really sit down and think though like, “What’s a win here? What am I hoping for?” And this is getting ahead a little bit, but even to state that in the conversation.

To say, “Hey, what I’m hoping for in this conversation is to just understand better why you made that decision.” Or, “What I’m hoping for in this conversation is to communicate my frustration to you in a way that’s helpful. In a way that you can understand me better.”

Rob Walling:

Yeah, and I mean good examples of these kinds of conversations are certainly conversations with your significant other. They are conversations with an employee, colleague who is not living up to the standards that you want as a company, and those are always hard conversations. Or it’s breaking some news to someone. Let’s say I need to break news to you that so-and-so is leaving the company, or that so-and-so is transitioning in a role, or that you need to transition in a role. There’s a bunch of different things that you might have to communicate to someone and there’s a lot of ways for it to be difficult, but I think a big piece that I’ve taken way especially as I’ve gotten older, because I didn’t used to think this was a big deal, I used to think that people could have conversations and they were just good at it, and I don’t know that anyone is naturally good at it. I think people practice and I think they prepare, and I think certain people get really good at it at a young age because they probably practice and prepare with their parents and siblings.

I didn’t use to have hard conversations when I was younger. But then you get into college, you get into your work life, and you find that you do actually have to prepare your mind for this. So, maybe in your 20’s, or for me a late bloomer, like early 30’s where I finally realized I’m going to have a lot of these conversations, I used to avoid them and try to figure out how can I structure my entire work life that I never have to have a hard conversation, and that’s not actually the answer because all of us are going to have these conversations at some point. I think the answer is to prepare and, even as weird as it sounds, practice for them. Especially if you’re coming in with the information, think through all the iterations of what someone might be thinking on the other end. It’s not to counter, or one-up, or anything but it’s to go down all the avenues so that there’s no surprises as you bring up whatever hard topic it may be.

Sherry Walling:

I think, done really well, this is a practice of empathy. This is a practice of you getting in someone else’s head and understanding, or at least trying to predict what they’re going to say, and how they’re going to respond, but also how they’re going to feel. I think if you can enter a hard conversation from a place of empathy, of feeling with someone, then that can do a lot to diffuse a potentially explosive or highly emotional conversation. When you’ve done the work to think about how this sounds to the person you’re talking to, and you can communicate that to them, that just makes hard conversations so much easier. You’re sort of both on the same team in that you are feeling together, you’re feeling what they’re feeling to some extent.

Rob Walling:

Right, It’s to really think about it from their perspective and try to get ahead of questions, comments, even like kind of brainstorming and thinking about tangents or anything that someone could potentially go down. What I’ve found in these conversations, of which I’ve had many for different reasons, right? It might be you and I having a conversations, it might be an employee, or someone I work for, or just a client, whatever it is, is that I’m pretty good as long as we stay kind of in the box that I imagine. It’s like, “Oh, we’re going to talk about this thing.” But as soon as a tangent comes, or we go off the rails, I don’t improve very well, and I feel like a lot of left brain developer folks, it’s just not our strong suit. As soon as we go off the rails, I’m kind of off in lizard brain land, where suddenly I’m flailing.

And the hair stands up on the back of my neck, and I get hot, and it’s like I don’t know how to handle this very well. And so, the more eventualities, or conversations, or topics, or tangents I can think of, and at least have some context of how I would respond, or how we can talk through that really the better things wind up for both of us. This is not just a protective measure of me, but it’s a protective measure of the relationship, and I can get out ahead and think, “Yeah, I have some news and it’s going to potentially disrupt, or upset, or potentially shock someone.” Not just go into a conversation and lay it out factual and just kind of dump information on somebody, but actually think, “What would I feel if this happened? And how can I help reassure this person as they’re thinking through it?” Because that’s the thing, if you have a hard conversation with someone, often there’s a lot of processing involved. You may have already processed this over the course of months or weeks.

Let’s say you’re selling a company and it’s been two months you’ve been thinking about selling the company. Well if you come to an employee and you say, “Hey, we’re selling the company.” They haven’t had the two months, and you need to give them some time, even if it’s only an hour, to just sit with that and think about it, and process it, and let their lizard brain run free, and answer their questions as you go through it.

Sherry Walling:

I think when you enter this kind of conversation it’s really helpful to name what you’re hoping for, but also say out loud your feelings about the conversation. Something like, “This is a really important conversation and I want it to go well, but I’m also aware that it is kind of an emotional conversation that might be a hard one to have.” I think opening a difficult conversation with some version of that can do a lot of neutralize whatever suspicion or defensiveness might exist at the outset of a conversation. I know the times that I say to you, “Hey, I’m kind of nervous to talk to you about this.” Or, “I want to talk to you about something and it’s kind of emotionally loaded for me.” Those statements go a long way to help the person you’re talking to also have an empathetic experience, also begin to feel some of what you’re feeling so that there’s this kind of shared emotional blend between the two of you.

Rob Walling:

I agree, and I think it comes down to evaluating what the power dynamic is. If it’s a significant other, then you’re on equal footing in essence. If it’s an employee you’re talking to, I think there’s a big part of thinking about what questions will they not ask that you should just answer. You should get out ahead of. If it’s someone on a power dynamic one layer below you, where you’re like, “You’re probably thinking this.” An example is, one of the hard conversations I’ve had in the past two years is when we were moving towards the acquisition of Drip, and I realized that for whatever reason whenever people hear that a company is going to be acquired they think everything bad is going to happen. What I’ve realized is that’s not actually the truth, good things can happen out of acquisitions. But when I brought it to each employee individually this is how I started the conversation, “I’m going to give you some news that’s going to sound bad at first, but I need you to trust me because I think it’s going to work out better for all of us.”

And that shaped the conversation, right? It was very honest. Like, think about how authentic that statement is and how if a politician were telling you something they would not say that. Or, we can all think of a boss that we didn’t like who deceived us, they would not have said that. But that’s what I said because it was the truth. And the sentence that followed that was, “I think in the next four weeks, Drip will be acquired by LeadPages.” And then that was this big then, but then that could come back and I said, “But remember, you need to trust me. Let’s talk this out.” And it was kind of just this very authentic statement of shaping and of kind of removing the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is, “Oh, my gosh. This is terrible.” But I already said, “It’s going to sound like bad news, but please hear me out because I actually think it’s going to work out best for all of us.”

Sherry Walling:

One of the things that helps set you up for success when you’re having a difficult conversation is to really make sure that you provide a context where you can have the conversation you need to have, and that means removing all distractions. There should be no pings and rattles and buzzes from electronic devices. There should be no people walking by and interrupting you. If you really want to have an important conversation honor the importance of what’s being expressed by making sure that you’re in the right environment for that. A private environment, a quiet environment. An environment where you’re not going to be interrupted.

Rob Walling:

Something to think about during the conversation is to use I statements, and this is straight out of psychology, but it’s like be specific and direct about what you’ve observed and what you’re feeling. Don’t use grand, sweeping statements. Things like always, never, or get so focused on one example that you’re lost in the nitty gritty of it. And these are tactics that people use on Reddit and Hacker News and forums. Anything you see where people want to do a sweeping generalization of, “You always do this. You never think of my … ” As soon as you say that you’ve lost people. You see it in forums, too. I hate to equate the internet with these kind of conversations, but it reeks of drama, and it reeks of this emotion that you instantly tune out if you’re a thinking person. So, be aware of your own internal … and I’ve become extremely aware of. You know, when you’re growing up, you know you do this, I see it in our kids, I think it’s a natural thing.

I correct our kids now and I was not corrected as a kid so up until in to my teens I would use statements like this, in high school and such. And now I remember conversations when I would say things like always and never, and I think it’s not true. I still see people doing it today in our community, in the founder community whether it’s on forums or in other avenues, and every time I see I’m like, “Yep. All right. When I was 18 I though that, too. You need to get a hold of yourself.”

Sherry Walling:

Well, you’re invoking an absolute. You’re going to the outer edges of the argument in a way that’s almost never accurate.

Rob Walling:

That’s right. And somehow it feels like you need to say that. Probably because someone at some point didn’t listen to you. It was a parent, it was a significant other, it was a friend who didn’t listen to you and so you felt you had to escalate. And by saying always and never and raising your voice there’s a bunch of things you can do to get people to hear you, but no one actually needs that if you’re just having a standard conversation about something. When you enter into these things it tends to be because there’s some baggage prior to that of someone just not listening to you.

Sherry Walling:

Although I do think that setting the conversation up well helps prevent your internal sense of need for this kind of escalation. If you can communicate, “Hey, this is really important to me. I would really like your full attention. I’m going to talk about something that’s kind of hard for me to talk about.” I think that is, for most reasonable people, enough of a statement that gets attention that you hopefully don’t feel like you need to use this hyperbolic data to say, “You always.’ Or, “You never.” I think one of the challenging things in conversations is that it’s helpful to be concrete and give examples of what you’re talking about, but it’s easy then to get into this tangential conversation of the specifics of an example. So, to sort of dissect the unique reasons why in that case you made that decision. And that is almost never helpful, too. I mean, I feel like if you’re going to someone because you feel like there’s this consistent pattern of them not communicating with clients in a way that’s respectful and sort of in keeping with your expectations for the company.

You want to give them concrete examples but you don’t want to get into this nitty gritty, “Well in this particular case that guy did this and that, and that’s why I did this.” That’s not helpful, you are talking about a pattern that you’ve seen over time and it’s important to put the kibosh on the unpacking of the specific details.

Rob Walling:

Something else to think about, is something I’ve become more and more aware of, is catching someone off guard surprising them with news tends to not be good. I remember feeling this many times. Typically, a boss would approach me and be like, “I want to meet.” And then we’d meet and they would just drop something on me. I’m trying to think of what it was but, “The company is being acquired.” Or, “We have a new client.” Or, “We’re shifting clients.” And I remember being, like me as a little bit introverted, left brain thinker like, “I need an hour or two to think about this and process it outside of this conversation.” I remember is what I used to think. Not all hard conversations are just about delivering shocking news, some of them are about trying to feel stuff out or talk about it. But when I know that I have something that I have to tell people, I try to give them as much of a heads up as possible. It’s not always possible to give everyone a heads up about everything as you’ve scheduled the meeting notice and put it on that calendar.

But if you can let someone know that, “Hey, we are going to talk about this topic.” It helps prepare them mentally so then they’re not on guard as you enter, or bring up that topic of conversation.

Sherry Walling:

It’s really a lot about knowing your audience, and knowing how to help them have the best engagement possible, how much notice you give them, and how you do that. But it’s part of that preparation of thinking through, “How can I maximize the likelihood that this person is really going to be engaged and present in this conversation?”

Rob Walling:

Yeah, and what’s interesting is when things go wrong we often assume that the content of our message is the problem. Sometimes, depending on how you feel, you either get more aggressive or you begin to water it down, or you avoid the content all together. But that’s the whole message of this hard conversation thing is to make the other person feel safe, and there’s a couple of ways that you can do this. The first one is, the person needs to know that you care about their best interests and their goals. And the other is they need to know that you care about them. And when people believe both of these they can relax and absorb what you’re saying and there’s ways to do this. Most of the conversations you’re going to have that are difficult, you have some type of relationship with them. If it’s a significant other, then you have months, years or decades depending on how long you’ve been hanging around. If it’s a colleague, someone you work with, you work for, or works for you, you need to build a relationship.

That’s a big part of managing someone or working with someone is that you do hang out at lunch, or you have working conversations and doing things, and that you’ve been authentic. It’s funny, all the hard conversations that I’ve had have been easier when I’m having them with people that I’ve been in the trenches with for six months or more. There are people that I have, in six months working with them, I’ve never had lunch with them once but we’ve been in meetings every week and they see how I operate, and they see that I’m authentic, and they see that I say what I mean and I mean what I say, and they see that I don’t sugarcoat things, and that when I call it like it is, it is that way. And then when I go to have a hard conversation with them, I’ve literally had people come out after and tell me, “I trust what you’re saying because you always say what you mean.”

Sherry Walling:

I think that’s such an advantage is you can develop that kind of rapport and reputation with people over time. I think the vast majority of our conversations both professionally and obviously personally are going to be from that framework, they’re going to be with people that we have an established relationship with. There are two super hard conversations that stand out in my mind from my life as a psychologist. One was actually before I was a psychologist, but I worked at an anonymous test site where my job was to talk with people about their HIV risk, administer an HIV test, and then give them the results. I think I was 21 or 22 at this point, had the job of telling people some of the worst news they’re going to get in their life, “You have had a positive HIV test.” And I don’t know these people, I don’t even know their names, I don’t know anything about them, it’s a totally private anonymous, and it’s a one-time conversation. I’m never going to see them again.

And the ability to be in that moment and to be present with someone delivering terrible news, and having no context, no relationship with them. But yet be trustworthy and help provide resources, and help comfort them. What I said in that moment, I don’t know if this is overstating it, but I believe sort of had the power, to some extent, to shape how they felt about this thing that was happening to them. One of the superpowers that I began to cultivate in my career before I went to [inaudible 00:28:09] school was to be able to listen to whatever someone needed to vent or say, and I think that is particularly hard in really difficult conversations because in all of our preparation, in everything that we have said so far in our podcast today, is really about what we say. It’s about communicating the message, how it’s communicated, how we prepare for it. I think sometimes when we go into hard conversations we’re so focused on how to say what we’re trying to communicate that it’s easy to bypass the listening part.

To really put our agenda on hold for a second and really hear what the other person is saying and what they’re feeling. I think the second thing that can make listening hard in the context of a conversation like this is the downside of what we talked about earlier. If you’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to anticipate the other person’s response you might have some scripts in your head that get cued by something they say but aren’t really the full embodiment of what they’re trying to say. Like you’re listening for, “Oh, okay. We’re taking this route in the choose your own adventure version of this conversation.” But you’re not actually listening to what they’re saying and what they mean. I think that the most satisfying kinds of conversations, even if they’re extremely painful conversations like the kind of extreme experiences that I’m talking about, when people feel heard, when they feel listened to, then their fears and concerns have been aired, and that you have taken them in.

That is the difference between someone walking away feeling like, “Man, that guy was a jerk. He just told me that I wasn’t doing well in my job.” Verus, “I feel like my struggles were listened to and I have a very specific individualized game plan for how to make this better.” So, listening is the key. If you don’t have the leisure of months of working with someone to build up social capital and to build up a reputation of being a straight shooter and being an honest person, listening is this other way of building rapport that you can do in less time when you are really communicating that you are tracking with them, and that you are focused and you hear what they’re saying and are giving them truly your full attention.

Rob Walling:

Yep. And that’s something I’m not very good at. I’m totally going to admit it. My superpower is over a longer period of time, which may only be months, but it’s doing exactly what I talked about. It’s like being authentic, delivering, shipping and building rapport and loyalty between me and someone else. The reason I call that out is I feel like there are folks who are listening to this who are probably in the same boat, who that is a superpower, or at least something that they do well. And then there are other folks, you are more naturally inclined to be able to build a rapport both directions based on minutes of interaction, and I think that’s really applicable and probably a more broader applicable skillset.

Sherry Walling:

Well, I think you need both. You need to be able to cultivate the sense of being trustworthy by being known as someone who is honest and straightforward. But then also, for many of us, we sometimes get dropped into situations where we don’t have the leisure of that, and that’s when I think talking less and listening more becomes a really important skill. I think a classic example of that is with a really angry client. Maybe your team is struggling to work with this really angry client and for whatever reason you get roped into deal with this. And they don’t know you, you don’t know them, you just know that they’re super unhappy with whatever service or product you provide. The quickest way to neutralize that is to really listen to them and to communicate that you are listening. Dealing with conflictual clients is a whole other conversation, but it’s a difficult conversation and many of us are afraid of it. The burden is not that we have exactly the right things to say, and we certainly don’t have the leisure of months of building up trust in most cases.

But if we can listen well and communicate that we’re listening then it’s a great way to neutralize upset people.

Rob Walling:

What I’ve found is, after having hard conversations, there is an art to ending them or closing them down. One way is to say thank you, but not in those words. It’s often things like, “Well, I really appreciate your input.” Or, “Really appreciate you taking the time today to chat with us.” Or, “I really appreciate your contribution.” You know it’s like there’s ways to say thank you that don’t sound patronizing, but that are genuine. Whether it’s someone working for you, if you’re working for them there’s this ending that kind of caps something that makes everyone feel okay about getting a difficult topic out. I think the three word summary is say thank you. But it’s not in that literal sense, it’s figuring out a tactful phrase. I’m going to be honest, when I’m heading into our conversation I will often think ahead of time what is almost the exact phrase that I’m going to think about as we’re wrapping up that I can say? I’m assuming there’s going to be a good ending from this, what is the phrase that I can use to make the other person feel appreciated?

Not in a disingenuous way but I’m guessing that I’m going to feel good at the end of this, what can I say that I’m not going to stumble around, that I can say to kind of indicate that things are closing up?

Sherry Walling:

I think another great way to end a conversation well is to be good at recaps, like be good at reviewing what was said. What were the important points? This is communicating that you heard their concerns, their fears, what they are saying. And then, also in a couple of bullet points, recapping what’s most important to you. I think if you can do that kind of summary statement well, that should then lead into specific next steps. Maybe nothing got solved in the conversation, maybe it was pretty painful and it was kind of a train wreck and it didn’t feel good. So the follow up is that “We’re going to come down and then we’re going to have another conversation. We’re going to talk again tomorrow. We’re going to talk again next week. We’re going to talk again after we’ve had a good night’s sleep.” That’s an okay followup. Not everything gets solved in one conversation. But I think the intention that’s stated out loud to continue the conversation, or to implement whatever decisions were made in the conversation, is an important way to have kind of a nice, clear ending.

And to reiterate the importance of the content, and the importance of people’s feelings about it.

Rob Walling:

If this topic of having hard conversations is something that you feel like you want to diver deeper into, whether you have a lot of them, you struggle with them, there is a book, it’s called Crucial Conversations, and I highly recommend it. I’ve listened to it on an audiobook, I’ve used it to prepare for multiple conversations of this type, and it dives really deep. At 12, 13 chapters deep it’s certainly far further than we could do. Consider out podcast kind of a summary of the ideas that you could do in crucial conversations, but that is the book title, and I would encourage you to go check it out on Audible, Kindle, or wherever paperbacks are sold.

Sherry Walling:

And that’s the night podcast shift signing off by Captain Macho and Zen Founder.

Rob Walling:

Oh, man. Yeah, it’s going to be good.

Sherry Walling:

If you loved this episode, or any of our other episodes, hey don’t hesitate to write a review on iTunes.

Rob Walling:

Or even just click five stars. You don’t have to write a review. That’s the whole thing, right? You click just the five star and then you’re done.

Sherry Walling:

Oh, it’s so easy, just the stars.

Rob Walling:

Just the stars.

Sherry Walling:

But, not four stars.

Rob Walling:

No, because if you’re going to do four stars just go ahead and email us questions@zenfounder.com and be like, “I was going to rate you four stars.” But, if you’re going to do five stars, go ahead and do that. Right?

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Sherry has a unique combination of experience and education that results in an ability to completely understand what founders go through generally, crossed with their personal foibles specifically. The result is truly helpful, not regurgitated pop psychology or the “coaches” who haven’t been there before themselves.